overtake them if they should go to Dresden, and then making up
their minds to start for Dresden only to learn at the eleventh hour,
through some accident, that the hunted game had "left for" Biarritz even
as the Rosenheims for Brussels. "We know plenty of people if we could
only come across them," Delia had more than once observed: she
scanned the Continent with a wondering baffled gaze and talked of the
unsatisfactory way in which friends at home would "write out" that other
friends were "somewhere in Europe." She expressed the wish that such
correspondents as that might be in a place that was not at all vague.
Two or three times people had called at the hotel when they were out and
had left cards for them without an address and superscribed with some
mocking dash of the pencil--"So sorry to miss you!" or "Off to-morrow!"
The girl sat looking at these cards, handling them and turning them over
for a quarter of an hour at a time; she produced them days afterwards,
brooding upon them afresh as if they were a mystic clue. George Flack
generally knew where they were, the people who were "somewhere in
Europe." Such knowledge came to him by a kind of intuition, by the
voices of the air, by indefinable and unteachable processes. But he held
his peace on purpose; he didn't want any outsiders; he thought their
little party just right. Mr. Dosson's place in the scheme of Providence
was to "go" with Delia while he himself "went" with Francie, and nothing
would have induced George Flack to disfigure that equation. The young
man was professionally so occupied with other people's affairs that it
should doubtless be mentioned to his praise that he still managed to
have affairs--or at least an affair--of his own. That affair was Francie
Dosson, and he was pleased to perceive how little SHE cared what had
become of Mr. and Mrs. Rosenheim and Master Samuel and Miss Cora. He
counted all the things she didn't care about--her soft inadvertent eyes
helped him to do that; and they footed up so, as he would have said,
that they gave him the rich sense of a free field. If she had so few
interests there was the greater possibility that a young man of bold
conceptions and cheerful manners might become one. She had usually the
air of waiting for something, with a pretty listlessness or an amused
resignation, while tender shy indefinite little fancies hummed in her
brain. Thus she would perhaps recognise in him the reward of patience.
George Flack